Ok Dicho and M. Ted

My source had recommended the book "This is Ragtime" by Terry Waldo and it was from this book that I got most of my story. I'll give you some direct quotes.

Referring to the 1972 performance of "Treemonisha" (arranged by T. J Anderson and Bill Bolcom), Waldo writes:

"The audience and critics were satisfied with the performance, but the controllers of the copyright were not. And who were the controllers of the copyright? The Music Trust of Lottie Joplin Thomas (Joplin's second wife, who died in 1955) claimed it was them. And who were the members of the trust? No one quite knew for sure at the time, but the advisor for the trust was Vera Brodsky lawrence, who was apparently dissatisfied with the T. J. Anderson orchestration, enough to have Bill Bolcom do another one for the next performance. 'Against my better judgment,' says Bolcom, 'I was told that if I didn't do it, the job would go to a Broadway hack. I'd had nothing against T. J.'s orchestrations.'

The opera was performed again and it was not received as well as had been hoped.

"Very little more was heard of the opera for the next few years. The controllers of the trust of Lottie Joplin effectively barred any further performances. T. J. Anderson, who was interested in establishing from the Treemonisha royalties a Scott Joplin Foundation for the furtherance of Afro-american music through scholarships, was particularly upset. As he said, 'Ninety-eight percent of pop music comes from the black community, but not two percent of the money is ever returned there.'

"The resulting acrimony over the dropping of Anderson's score had ruined the friendship of Bolcom and Anderson, and Bolcom was now sorry he had done the thing. He later stated: 'Vera Lawrence is a tragic figure who might have done more harm than good for the composer. The sad part is that I don't think she meant to do irreparable harm to Joplin. But she did by tying up his opera with legal maneuvering.'

"The trust also turned down an offer by Columbia Records to record the complete opera, and Twentieth Century-Fox was rejected in a bid to reproduce some selections in a television movie. In spite of all requests, Treemonisha remained unperformed throughout the height of the Joplin craze brought on by The Sting."

Waldo then goes into Lawrence hiring Gunther Schuller and he questions whether this produced a opera better than the Anderson-Bolcom production which he regards as truer to Joplin's vision. Then he writes:

"...I was curious as to why no one else had been doing any of this music. As it turned out, the ultimate success or failure of Treemonisha was not in the hands of the artists so much as lawyers. Upon the death of Lottie Joplin in 1955, the Joplin estate was tuned over to the Lottie Joplin Thomas trust fund with a lawyer, Robert Rosborne, as trustee. There was in 1975 one surviving descendant of Lottie--a niece, Mrs. Mary Warmley. This fact Vera Lawrence must have discovered in doing research on the publication of the Joplin works. Lawrence and her lawyer, Alvin Deutsch, then began acting as advisors to the estate in association with Mr. Rosborne. The exact arrangement was unknown, but the net result was the trust's assertion of control over who would and who would not perform the opera. Hence, the three-year absence of any performance during the crest of the Joplin fad.

"The whole business finally came to a head when the trust threatened to sue Olympic Records over the inclusion of several numbers from Treemonisha in a 1974 five-record set recorded by Dick Zimmerman--the same Dick Zimmerman, incidentally, who had published the list of needed rags in 'The Rag Times' for Lawrence's Joplin publication.

"When first contacted and informed that they had no legal right to record the Treemonisha material, Olympic offered to repackage the album without it, but Deutsch insisted on a $3,500 fee ($2,500 in damages and $1,000 in legal fees, in exchange for not suing the company). Instead of paying this, the president of the company decided to investigate the legal rights of the estate to prohibit recordings. He discovered that the numbers had been previously recorded in 1971 for a special sale at the Lincoln Center Library and by various other artists. According to copyright law, only the first recorded performance needs a license from the copyright holder. Olympic sued for $750,000 (reputation, damages, etc.); and the trust countersued in federal court for copyright infringement.

"Meanwhile Mary Warmley was interviewed by a representative of Olympic and was discovered to be an elderly woman, a former domestic, who was unaware that The Sting had ever existed, did not own a phonograph, and had never heard Joplin's music. When asked about the money she was making from the various royalties from the music, she said that every once in a while her lawyer, Mr. Rosborne, would take her to the bank and give her what she needed.

"There were more lawsuits. The Lottie Joplin Thomas trust only spoke for the rights of Scott Joplin the composer; the rights of Scott Joplin the publisher, on the other hand, were theoretically controlled by someone else. And of course there was a conflict. According to the copyright records in the United States, Treemonisha is controlled by the estate of Wilbur Sweatman, a musician friend of Joplin. When Sweatman died, his illegitimate daughter tried to pick up the copyright but couldn't, as New York does not recognize illegitimate children. It then went to his sister, Eva Sweatman, who died some years later, leaving the estate to her friend, Robert Sweeney. As of 1975 the books of ASCAP showed the Wilbur Sweatman Music Publishing Company (Robert Sweeney) still receiving money on Treemonisha and not the Lottie Joplin estate. Sweeney offered half of his rights on Treemonisha to the head of Olympic Records if he would follow their lawsuit against the Lottie Joplin Trust to a successful conclusion. As of this writing, the case was scheduled for hearing by the New York State Supreme Court.

"It appears that we may never get a chance to evaluate the full potential of Treemonisha because of what actually amounts to effective censorship of its free interpretation. Joplin never had the chance himself to experiment with the production, but maybe someone else might have been able to, possibly cutting it down to a shorter work. It would be a sad thing indeed if any one of the interpretations of Joplin's rags had been the only one permitted to be heard, but that, in effect, is what has happened to his most ambitious effort. It seems a safe bet that it will now be returned to the lifeless library shelves and museums from which it was retrieved for such a short time."

Anyway, this book is published by Hawthorn Books and was copyrighted in 1976. Things could have changed but it certainly does not appear to be so. Although I had many details wrong, Treemonisha has been virtually silenced. The public is largely unaware of it (certainly the black community knows almost nothing of it as I have yet to meet a single black person who has heard of it before I turned him/her onto it) and it doesn't appear that that is going to change. I think labels are simply losing interest.

I thought maybe the 75-year copyright thing was in effect but it appears to be nothing more than a hopelessly tangled morass of legal horseshit that has more or less killed Treemonisha. The Lottie Joplin Trust and the Wilbur Sweatman estate are simply at war and any label that attempts to take on Treemonisha will be caught in a hopeless crossfire.